I am back home after a fabulous 9-day vacation to Georgia and Florida. This vacation was much needed and I feel so lucky to be in a position that allows me to take vacations like this.
The trip started off well. I left work, went home. The boy had the car mostly packed, and we hit the road for Savannah, Georgia. We drove the 11+ hours to Savannah, I slept most of it, but I also worked the entire day before. I spent most of our time in Savannah exploring the historic squares, he spent most of it by the pool reading on his iPad. It was a fabulous trip and I am so thankful we have friends who let us stay with them for a couple nights. So, we moved on down to Florida a day later, stopping in the Daytona Beach area for lunch.
Now, most people go to Orlando to go to the parks. I would have been perfectly content to lounge by the pool and read the entire time. Except for the fact I packed only three books. One of which I was almost finished and another one I want to read, but it's a classic (Jane Eyre if you must know) and I really wasn't in the mood to re-read it on this trip, and then my third was a quick read chick-lit. Well, by Tuesday night I had finished the books I wanted to read and desperately seeking a different book to read. I picked up my iPhone, typed "Bookstores" into Yelp and came up with several bookstores in a 15 mile radius and figured since a couple of them were close to Universal Studios, I would be able to stop by one Wednesday after we left the park.
I am no longer trusting Yelp. After dropping him and his mother back off at the resort, I went out on the expedition to find myself a couple books to last me through the end of the week. So I drive back out to tourist town Orlando, first stop a fairly new mall (think one of the Mills malls) that is completely vacated except for a skate park and a couple restaurants! Said bookstore, obviously no longer there. Ok no big deal, there is a big name bookstore about 2 miles away. Pull into the shopping center where it is supposed to be, I can see where it used to be, but there no longer is a store there. At this point I am kind of annoyed, but saw an outlet center down the road so I putzed around there for a little bit to gather my strength so I could figure out my next course of action. I got back on Yelp (I hadn't learned yet) and found 2 other bookstores. Plug directions into GPS, specifically with no tollways, and get sent on a tollway. Turn back around to find the 4th bookshop, end up back by the resort, and of course the bookstore isn't there because I had spent the better part of the first 4 days of my trip scouting out a bookstore that didn't have a Disney character plastered on the front of it.
Defeated I marched myself over to Target and picked up a couple more chick-lit books, although they had the new Jodi Picoult that I really, really, really want to read; I am not a fan of hard back books.
So, I have removed Yelp from my iPhone and have decided I will be ordering books 3 weeks prior to my trip and packing several. Although, the boy is saying he is going to get me an iPad so I don't run into this problem again. I am resistant because I don't know how I feel about eReaders just yet; I am not against them, I just like the way a book feels in my hand.
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